All posts filed under “Announcements”

2016 has been a complicated year, and circumstances have meant that I have, rather unprofessionally, neglected this blog, my website, and the Design with Intent newsletter (which now has nearly 400 very patient subscribers).

In summer 2016 I moved on from the RCA to Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to become a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Design. This has meant a huge life upheaval for Harriet and me, moving from a boat on the Thames at Richmond to, eventually, what I must learn to call a duplex in Friendship, a pleasant neighbo(u)rhood in Pittsburgh built for the middle managers of Carnegie Steel. At CMU, in my first semester, I have taught Play Lab, a senior design lab discussed at length here and contributed to a range of other graduate and undergraduate programmes. In the Spring, I will be teaching the junior Environments Studio – an exploratory new studio class – and, with Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely, a required class called Persuasion. I will also be running PhD seminars in Research(ing) by Design(ing), continuing some of Cameron Tonkinwise’s work. (I remain a visiting tutor at the RCA, temporarily at least, to continue to supervise the PhDs of NazlÄ± TerzioÄŸlu, Chang Hee Lee and Dave Pao; Delfina Fantini van Ditmar passed her PhD in the summer.)

Carnegie Mellon was attractive for many reasons. The School of Design has a vision for design education and research, Transition Design, which is more exciting (and reflectively critical) than simply repeating “we’re number 1”. Transition Design is very relevant to my previous research in design for behaviour change, sustainable design, energy use, designing agency, understanding the systems around us, community-led design and many other areas, and in acknowledging “that we are living in ‘transitional times’” it enables design to be seen as a tool for engaging with complexity, with “an understanding of the interconnectedness of social, economic, political and natural systems”. I wanted to work at a university that had a professional approach to employment and career development for younger faculty, and CMU offers this to an impressive extent, along with proper employment contracts and administrative support to faculty. I wanted to work somewhere that values people’s contributions, has an informed and mature approach to research, teaching and service, that is welcoming, friendly and interested, and where the obsession is with doing things well rather than simply bringing in more and more money, and while CMU brings in plenty of money, there is a genuine commitment to excellence along with it. Most of all, I wanted to work somewhere where I would have a chance to develop and follow a vision for a programme of research and teaching, and where I would be supported and trusted to do so, where a career was possible and encouraged and with a much much flatter hierarchy of management, and I think CMU can deliver this. As an Assistant Professor, I have a lot of freedom and autonomy, much more than I would have (at this level) at any of the UK institutions I have ever worked at. It gave me lots of pride to see my Play Lab students’ work on show at Focus, the senior design exhibition, earlier this month. CMU has been welcoming, exciting, enjoyable and an enthusiastic employer so far, and I want to thank everyone who has made Harriet’s and my first few months so good.

The Britain that Harriet and I left, or rather the pre-23-June Britain, feels like the past, another country now, where, indeed, they do things differently (and with much more decorum and less pride in ignorance). It has been a very strange, and sad thing to watch from abroad as the UK determinedly keeps shooting itself in the same foot so comprehensively and with so much nastiness, and I miss, basically, the idea that the future can be better than the past. I like 1950s cars and design and writing and lots of other things, but I don’t want to live there. But of course, it’s been a very weird time to live in America too, and to see what a hugely divided country it is, and yet also not to have to experience that in everyday life: the milieu of a university professor in the US is not one where I see much opinion other than utter disdain for, and horror at, what has happened. The situation in the US, the UK, and in many other countries where danger is on the rise, leads me to articulate a possible new role / challenge for the field of design for behaviour change, which I will outline in a forthcoming blog post introducing my new lab at CMU, the Imaginaries Lab.

Design is increasingly about people’s behaviour, but this is often considered simplistically. The Design with Intent book aims to give practitioners a more nuanced approach to design and behaviour, working with people, people’s understanding, and the complexities of everyday human experience.

It will build on the toolkit, and my PhD, but also what I’ve learned over the last few years on practical research projects, with people in real contexts, around people’s understanding of, and interaction with, technology and designed systems, including SusLab, Creative Citizens, CarbonCulture at DECC and Creating Sustainable Innovation. The book will also build on examples, good and bad, from all over the world, addressing a wide range of problems and contexts, both social and commercial. It’ll cover design across products, services and environments, physical and digital (and, increasingly, in combination), and I’ll be asking for readers’ suggestions and examples for particular ideas and themes.

I’m hoping that the book will offer a more nuanced approach to designing around people’s behaviour, based on designing and researching with people rather than ‘for’ them, learning from people’s understanding of the world, and embracing the complexities of everyday human experience. As I said last year, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with how I see “design for behaviour change”, and the “behaviour change agenda”, being applied in practice, with simplistic, deterministic and individualist approaches which often seem to be about treating humans as defective components, that need to be constrained or tricked, denying variety, complexity, culture and social context. I started blogging ten years ago specifically to explore and critique the use of design to control and exert power, and that hasn’t gone away.

Writing the book is going to be a big job alongside my work at the RCA, and my plan is to blog the process to keep myself on track–partly also to get suggestions and input along the way. So please do keep an eye on the site, and sign up to the newsletter for updates. Thanks to everyone who gave me the confidence to take the plunge with this!

Drawing Energy describes a drawing-based research project undertaken by the Royal College of Art as part of SusLabNWE (2012-15). The project explored people’s perceptions of energy, by asking them to write, draw or illustrate their thoughts and reactions to the question ‘What does energy look like?’ Over 180 members of the public took part in the process.

The larger SuslabNWE study saw 11 partners from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK come together to understand and investigate energy use in the home. At the Royal College of Art in the UK, we looked at bringing together two ideals and practices around inclusive design and sustainability. Both often have different starting points and deal with different scales. Inclusive design usually focuses on people’s needs and capabilities at the domestic scale, while sustainability embraces complexity and systems thinking, addressing systemic change.

Drawing Energy negotiates a space between the two, bringing together people’s aspirations and perspectives with the context of socio-political mandates and changing infrastructure or technologies. The study also moves beyond the idea of purely functional research (such as numerically measuring energy use) to depict the less tangible area of how people relate to energy in a visual, literal or metaphorical way — it takes us from data ‘performance’ through to human ‘perception’. The work represented in this collection builds on a history of using drawing as a tool for research and as a way to enable people to express their ideas and imagination fully.

We hope you appreciate this publication, whether you see it as a strategy within design research, or simply enjoy it for the rich and varied artwork that represent the public’s views of energy.

Drawing Energy: Exploring Perceptions of the Invisible was designed by Hannah Montague and edited by Rama Gheerawo.

It’s been a bit of a chaotic time recently, both in family terms and professionally, so my apologies for the lack of updates. In February I started as Visiting Research Tutor in Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) at the RCA, helping develop a programme of research and helping to supervise a group of excellent PhD researchers with a range of very interesting projects. IDE has one of the largest design research cohorts within the RCA, and I am looking forward to helping develop this further, in some new directions, through both academic and industry collaborations.

At Nordes 2015 at Konstfack in Stockholm in June, I will be running a workshop, The Performance of Nonhuman Behaviour, with Delfina Fantini van Ditmar (IDE PhD candidate) and Claudia Dutson (Architecture PhD candidate). My part of the workshop builds on many of the ideas explored in this blog over the years, around people’s understanding of the systems they interact with, and I’m hoping it will be a fun and useful event. More details in due course.

Some background

I’ll be blunt here: academic career prospects for what are termed “early career researchers” in the UK are not great, particularly in subjects which fall between the cracks of major research councils’ funding scope, and particularly at places like the RCA which don’t have any kind of staff development programme for researchers, and which depend heavily on “visiting” and part-time staff, often with no contract at all. My choices have been, essentially: 1) bring in enough funding to pay my own salary plus all of the overheads which universities require (which I have tried to do, and am trying to do, but which is very difficult starting from a near-zero base); 2) work on others’ projects on a series of short-term contracts, with little strategic input (which I don’t mind doing if I have to, but which is a step backwards); 3) leave and go somewhere with better support for early career staff. The RCA has some fantastic people, both students and staff, so I am trying option 1), as best I can, but I am aware that as an institution, it doesn’t try very hard to hold onto people.

In option 2) terms, working for the Helen Hamlyn Centre together with Vehicle Design at the RCA, I have temporarily (since January) also been project manager for setting up the public engagement work package of GATEway, an Â£8 million Innovate UK project looking at understanding and demonstrating driverless cars in the UK, led by TRL in conjunction with partners including the Royal Borough of Greenwich, Commonplace, and Shell. The introduction of new technology of this kind, the designed systems, services and infrastructure around it, and the potential effects on everything from urban planning to jobs, is fascinating, and I will be intrigued to see how the project develops and what it finds.

SusLab, Drawing Energy and Powerchord

My job at the Helen Hamlyn Centre as part of the RCA’s role in SusLab has ended when the RCA’s funding ended, although I am still contributing to the project by supporting other partners in analysis and writing up of the results, and co-editing an academic book with Professor David Keyson and Dr Olivia Guerra Santin from TU Delft.

From the UK perspective, our book Drawing Energy, on which Flora Bowden has led, with myself, Clare Brass and Rama Gheerawo as co-authors, should be published in June this year by the Helen Hamlyn Centre. I’ll put more details on the SusLab at the RCA blog when they’re available.

Design with Intent

In February, while I was en route to Munich to talk at the wonderful Hans Sauer Foundation Social Design Elevation Days, a PHP upgrade by the webhost, combined with a long outdated version of MediaWiki meant that the Design with Intent website became unusable (blank, basically). My botched attempt to fix it rapidly via FTP, hotspotting from my phone in an airport departure lounge, made things worse. So I have put up a temporary site which has most of the same content, but does not have individual pages for each pattern. Something better is on the way when I get a spare weekend…

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V&A Digital Design Weekend: 20 & 21 September

At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the 2014 V&A Digital Design Weekend, on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st September, from 10.30am to 5pm, is a fantastic transformation of the V&A into “one big workshop… where visitors come together with artists and designers to discuss and think about objects, making and working collaboratively.” We’re honoured to be presenting our work in some very talented company, including James Bridle, Tine Bech and Bristol’s REACT Hub.

You can take part in Drawing Energy–please come along to see the collection, and create your vision of energy!–and play with Powerchord, and contribute to shaping the next stage of its development.

Breaking Through: New projects from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design: 15-25 September

Our projects are also featured in the Helen Hamlyn Centre’s own exhibition and symposium, taking place in the Dyson Building at RCA Battersea, each day from the 15th to 25th September, from 10am to 5.30pm. Breaking Through “demonstrates how emerging ideas can shape alternative futures in areas as diverse as energy use, office life and ageing populations–when ethnographic research and people-centred design are considered in tandem.Â From designs for aÂ new London taxi to innovations in healthcare and developments for digital communities, there is an emphasis on user push rather than technology pull as the driving force to improve people’s lives through design.”

We’ll be showing the results of Drawing Energy so far, and you can also play with Powerchord by using appliances and hearing how it responds.

About the projects

Drawing Energy (What Does Energy Look Like?) is a drawing project led by the Royal College of Art to explore how people imagine and think about energy. It is part of the wider European SusLabNWE project that is exploring energy use in the home.

Over the past year we have asked over one hundred people – students, children, academics, energy experts, designers and members of the public – to draw for us what they think energy looks like.

Powerchord is a prototype data sonification system, under development, which turns near-real time electricity monitoring, of multiple household appliances, into sound. The concept was developed from ideas suggested by householders during co-creation sessions as part of the SusLabNWE project.

The prototype uses the ‘guts’ of a CurrentCost energy monitor, connected to an Arduino which reads the XML data stream from the monitor and maps the power levels to particular tracks, played using aÂ WAV Trigger. The current iteration uses birdsong, of different intensities, from recordings at xeno-canto.org

The project is described in a paper presented by Dan Lockton at the SoniHED Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data, 12 September 2014, York:

This full-day workshop should be of interest to designers and researchers working at intersections of sustainability and ‘behaviour change’–two major current themes across product, service and architectural design and human-computer interaction.

We hope we can learn from each other–we want participants to share methods, ideas, stories ‘from the field’ and needs and possibilities arising from ongoing and future projects, through group exercises, presentations and re-enactments; over the day, we’ll collect these insights in a structured format, matching needs, methods and case studies with potentially applicable behavioural design techniques. This will be then published online as a guide for researchers, but also to inform others working on sustainability and behaviour change–including in a policy context–of design research’s value in this area.

While technology is important, people (whether or not we call them ‘users’) are key to the environmental and social challenges of design in everyday life. Understanding people–and the contexts and social practices of living and working–is crucial. Without these insights, work on sustainability risks being based on assumptions about human behaviour and decision-making which may not capitalise on the opportunities design offers.

In the workshop, we’ll be exploring methods for involving and including people better in design research for sustainability and behaviour change–designing with people. These include ethnographic methods, participatory design and co-creation, prototyping, probes and provocations, and integrating qualitative and quantitative data. We’ll discuss aspects distinguishing sustainability and energy research from general user research–how can specialist knowledge best be used?

Taking part

To take part in the workshop, you need to be registered for the conference (you can’t register separately for the workshops), and also submit a case study (see below) directly to us – email dan.lockton@rca.ac.uk – by 1 April. We will let you know your acceptance by 15 April, which is also the cut-off date for the early bird conference fee, so we’ll try to make sure we let you know a few days before this.

Submitting a case study

We would like participants to put together brief case studies (approx 2-4 pages) of methods, ideas and stories ‘from the field’ about research relating to behaviour, people’s interaction with products, services or environments, with either a sustainability perspective or relating to other areas of social benefit. These do not have to be formal papers, but they can be if you wish. Key things to include are:

how you framed the problem you were investigating, or what you were trying to find out

how/why you chose the research methods you did

how they worked in practice – how did the results inform your design process?

how you would improve the methods

Ideally, we would like you to bring to the workshop (or at least have images of) some of the actual artefacts / tools involved. For example, if you used a form of design probe, be prepared to talk through the details of it.

Please also include, again briefly, some needs and possibilities you see arising from ongoing and future projects: what kinds of questions are you going to need to answer?

The point of the workshop is collectively to share and learn from each other’s methods and experience, so our main criteria for selecting participants will be based on a) making sure we have a diverse set of people, methods and contexts represented, and b) making sure we keep the workshop to a reasonable number of participants to allow easier discussion and group work over the day.